


Misshapen, Marvelous Monster

by absolutebearing



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: (kind of), Ambiguous Relationships, Angst, Character Study, Extended Metaphors, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Interlude, Mental Health Issues, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Red Dead Redemption 2 Secret Santa 2020, Sadie has post traumatic stress disorder is the headline, Unresolved Sexual Tension, interludes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:21:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28389942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/absolutebearing/pseuds/absolutebearing
Summary: Sadie Adler loses her husband and turns into a monster. Arthur can kind of see the monster, and he seems to like what he sees nonetheless.For the RDR2 Secret Santa on Tumblr! This is for @squidproquoclarice/@deathmallow, who wanted Sadie and Arthur. Happy New Year!
Relationships: Jake Adler/Sadie Adler, Sadie Adler & Abigail Roberts Marston, Sadie Adler & Arthur Morgan, Sadie Adler & Tilly Jackson, Sadie Adler/Arthur Morgan
Comments: 2
Kudos: 28





	Misshapen, Marvelous Monster

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deathmallow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathmallow/gifts).



> Warnings for RDR-level violence and sadness. Rape is referenced, often obliquely, throughout, but only described explicitly in chapter 1. Read the first paragraph, then jump to "When she next hears voices..." to skip that description altogether.

  1. _Ambarino_



The night they kill Jake, Sadie swears she will never care for another man again. The morning after, she amends herself: she will never concern herself with another human being. By noontime, with the sun coming in blinding off the dirty snow, as she stares at a bottle that rolled under the table and tries to ignore the noises around her, she is steadfast. She will not be a person anymore. She’ll grow claws, and fangs. She’ll rip her own skin off the bone. She’ll do worse to anyone who comes close to her. She’ll tear their eyes out before they can see her.

In the root cellar, after, listening to the footsteps on her floor - her and Jake’s - on the floor, the jeers and howls of the men drinking her husband’s liquor and eating the food she’d canned to last them the winter, she waits and imagines what it would feel like to cut the fat one’s neck ear to ear. Time gets slippery, and she loses count of meals and sunrises while she waits in the cellar.

On what she thinks is the third day, they drag her up while they’re eating. The fat one wrenches her legs apart and she stares under the table again. More mess has joined the bottle, carelessly littering her kitchen floor. They must throw things away when they finish with them, hurl them out of sight, like animals. She prays they’ll drop a knife. The man on top of her makes a noise in the back of his throat and lays one heavy, dirty hand on her face. She turns her head, slowly, looks at him properly for the first time, sees crumbs and grease in his beard. 

“You’ll see me again,” she says, evenly, and hears her own voice like a stranger in another room. “And I’ll make you beg.” 

He doesn’t seem to hear her. She wonders if she spoke at all. He grunts appreciatively and shoves a dirty thumb into her mouth. She bites down, hard.

In the commotion that follows, she’s gleeful, giddy, smiling even as it stings her face where they slapped her. In the chaos of laughter and the chorus of _bitch_ and _whore_ and _fiesty little thing_ , she’s laughing even as her head spins, because - like a monster - she’s tasted a little bit of blood now. She’s got the scent. Under the kitchen, sleep swallows her in the dark. 

When she next hears voices, they’re followed by gunshots, and she wonders if they’ll all kill each other. She feels hollow, empty, and then the cellar door is wrenched open and a man is crooning, someone new - she learned all their voices - and Sadie knows only one thing: she won’t let it happen again.

But, of course, Dutch and Arthur arrive, just more strangers to her then, and get between her and Micah as Sadie’s kitchen is eaten by flame. Dutch talks to her like a woman, like a person, and the monster retreats. Her claws retract; her fangs fail her. She lets him take her hand. Later, she won’t be able to remember if it was him or Arthur that found the blanket he puts over her shoulders, but it’s the last thing that will ever smell like Jake. 

“We’re bad men, but we ain’t them,” Arthur promises her, his voice straining just a little in the cold. “It’s okay.” He lifts her onto the horse, and says he’ll keep her safe as the house and everything she ever built crackles and burns behind him. He barely looks at her, then - that promise comes that easily, to him. 

  
  


In Colter, she doesn’t speak much. The women take it in turns to offer her hot food and remark on the cold and promise her she’s safe, but she can tell their hearts aren’t in it. Something’s happened, clearly, among these _bad men who ain’t them_ , and the women who travel with them. They fuss over her and the baby by rote, and the child’s mother, the dark haired one, paces relentlessly. 

She watches as their scores and worries shuffle relentlessly between them, gathering distantly that someone has died, someone is missing, someone has vanished into the forest. The former turns out to be John, and the first time she sees him, Sadie thinks he’s a corpse, draped between Arthur’s and Javier’s shoulders, hair in his face and blood frozen to his coat. It’s only when they put him on the cot and Abigail kneels by his head and touches his icy hair that she realizes he’s alive. 

“There y’are, idiot,” Arthur hums as he lowers John onto the cot, and Sadie is struck by how gentle he sounds. “You’ll live. You’re lucky.” He reaches down and grasps John’s limp hand once, almost like a one-sided handshake, and then gets out of the way, lets the women swarm John, their newest priority. They’re probably grateful for something to do.

Relegated, abruptly, to the third-most pitiful person in the room, Sadie is left by the fire, a spectator in this intimate play. Arthur steps back until he’s beside her, then seems to realize he’s done so and grunts uncomfortably. 

“Mornin’, Miss Adler,” he says, all schoolboy. She cranes her neck to stare up at him, swaddled in his coat and against the light from the window, harsh morning sunlight that flanks him, standing in the suspended dust that fills the cabin. He coughs, nervously, and adds, “Gettin’ on alright?”

She continues to stare at him, even as his eyes skitter back to the women clumped around John, and wonders if she should answer that question. _Gettin’ on alright_ , she imagines echoing harshly, _gettin’ on alright. I haven’t slept, not in six days, and I can’t, because if I do, the last day I was married to Jake will end, even though it is over, and I can’t remember what it felt like, because I grew scales and feathers in the root cellar, I turned into an animal, and I don’t remember what it felt like before. It hurts to piss. I don’t want you to ask me if I’m getting on alright. I don’t want you to be able to see me._

_Thank you for the blanket_.

She swallows, and it hurts like she’s got a fever. He seems to recognize it. “Stupid question,” he acknowleges, and then he’s gone. 

  
  


  1. _New Hanover_



They talk about the O’Driscolls constantly, these men. And it is the men - the women don’t seem to carry the grudge with nearly the fervor. But the men, especially Dutch, breathe out the feud like gospel. Colm O’Driscoll, Sadie learns by listening, is an archnemesis to Dutch, and a compass, a mirror image he can orient himself against. And everyone else, it seems, orients themselves around Dutch.

Secretly, Sadie thinks, Dutch wouldn’t savor killing them half as well as she would. She doesn’t say so; she barely knows these men.

She doesn’t say much, actually, and she knows they all feel bad for her, and that their sympathy has its limits. She’s not much use to them - she helps cook, sometimes, but there are slim pickings, it seems, for Dutch’s women. Two of them, Abigail and Mrs. Grimshaw, are excused from the profession the rest have. Mrs. Grimshaw runs camp. Abigail does laundry and minds Jack. The rest - three of them, Tilly, Karen, and Mary-Beth - work in town. Abigail and Mrs. Grimshaw are both likewise familiar with the profession. Sadie doesn’t begrudge them, but barely sleeps as it is, and if Dutch had asked her to join them she’d have fled. 

He doesn’t, though. She helps Abigail with the laundry, a little, and Abigail tells her absently that she’ll be alright now, that it will get easier. Abigail is a married woman herself, and thinks she knows everything because of it. Sadie likes her - she’s sturdy and kind - but listening to Abigail is like listening to a child. _Everything will be alright, it just takes time_ , Abigail insists, day after day, as they wring out greasy trousers. Sadie can’t help but resent her, even if she’s sure Abigail learned to repeat the same words long ago just to survive. 

The women all try, haltingly, emptily, to comfort her. It’s not that they’re doing anything wrong. It’s that they’re unspecific. It’s that they’re guessing. _You’re safe now_ , they say, like she can remember what that felt like. She grew up hard and she and Jake eked a life out of hard country; she doesn’t need to be pampered. But safety meant knowing the sun would rise on the same world it went down on; safety meant Jake and and dreamless nights. Sadie isn’t so foolish as to imagine these women have lived easy lives. But they haven’t lost Jake, so what can they know?

She likes Hosea, who sits with her and doesn’t speak, except to answer her questions about where they are or who they’re hiding from. He always says he hopes she doesn’t mind the company of outlaws. She thinks of what Arthur told her, the night the farmhouse burned. She tells him, “I think it’s a matter of perspective.” He smiles like he’s proud. 

  
  


The days wear on, and her fangs and talons recede bit by bit. There’s a shape to the time, now they’ve settled in a place called Horseshoe Overlook - they all rise a little after dawn, and then men peel off in twos and threes into town, leaving someone behind on guard duty and Pearson with the food. The women settle into chores, the remaining men go hunting or play dominoes, and someone regularly makes sure Jack hasn’t wandered too far and John hasn’t died yet. The captured O’Driscoll remains tied to a post. The one they call Uncle sleeps; Mrs. Grimshaw gives orders, Dutch plays opera, Hosea tells stories, Molly ignores them all, and Javier plays guitar. In the evenings, everyone eats and drinks and Sadie sits alone in a wagon listening, and sometimes she even sleeps at night. She could imagine that she’d always lived this way, sometimes, when she has a task and her hands can move repeatedly and her head can be empty. The problem is, she would never have _wanted_ to always live like this, standing by Pearson’s carriage taking direction. She’s getting restless. 

And then there’s the one O’Driscoll none of them will hurry up and kill.

He insists he isn’t an O’Driscoll at all, and it’s probably the truth or Dutch wouldn’t have kept him alive so long. He’s tied up to a tree in his piss-soaked trousers begging for water and scraps, and nobody pays him much mind except Tilly, who occasionally sneaks him water, and Mary-Beth, who patches up his wounds one day and regularly sneaks him a bit of food and water. It’s the decent thing to do, Sadie reflects darkly, and she hates them for it. She hates _decent_.

It’s a Sunday, per Tilly, and Sadie has nothing to do. It’s getting on late afternoon, but too early to start cooking dinner, and she’s been sitting alone by the wagons with her plate from supper - the girls liked to cook a big Sunday mid-day meal - untouched and balanced on her knees. She’d dreamt of the farmhouse last night, woken up feeling raggedy and the wrong shape for her own skin, uncontainable. She’d spent the whole day that way, listening to Swanson drunkenly ramble and Dutch talk his own poetry to an indifferent Molly, helping Pearson cook and hating all of them for being so blithe and stupid, for being regular humans who fit inside their bodies. Hated the women for being kind in spite of what had been done to them - Sadie was mostly guessing, but she wasn’t stupid - while she could scarecely remember how to talk to people. She’d spent three days, two nights, maybe, in that root cellar, but she felt like she’d been locked away for centuries.

Karen is leading most of the camp in a song, and nobody is paying much attention to the outsiders - her, and Kieren, who is bleating miserably about how hungry he is. She wishes she could slit his throat. 

“ _Please_ , anything for a little - just a little to eat,” Kieren is calling uselessly, and Sadie looks down at the cold lumps of untouched food on her plate. 

Without consciously deciding to, she takes the plate in both hands and stands up, straightens her back, and begins making her way over to the tree Kieren is tied to. He seems to see her coming and swallows his pleas, looking shyly from the ground to her, probably just daring himself to hope that help has arrived. The animal in Sadie licks its lips, bares its fangs. Delicious.

She comes just close enough to reach him, if she wanted to, and holds out the plate wordlessly. He stares at her, and she can _see_ the way his breath picks up in hopeful anticipation, can practically see his mouth watering. 

“You must be hungry,” she coos, in as sympathetic a voice as she can muster. It sounds sickly-sweet, not right, like the smell of mold.

He either can’t tell or doesn’t care, because he sags in his bonds and sighs, “Like you wouldn’t believe.” She considers asking him if he wants to bet.

“Well, I’ll leave this here then,” she says, flicking her wrist so the plate is a shade closer to him, and the sweetness doesn’t feel forced this time. She turns the plate on its side, lets the cold potatoes and venison slide messily to the ground. She drops the plate, too, for good measure, savoring the nastiness with a fullness, an awakeness, she hasn’t felt since before. “In the dirt,” she adds, digging the meal into the mud with her heel, “where those other O’Driscolls left my husband.” 

Her voice cracks treacherously on the last word - it’s not even _true_ , they dumped his body in the snow and didn’t even bother to bury him - and her heart is pounding in her throat. She turns and walks away before she explodes, before she bursts into tears or the monster rips out of her body and tears Kieren’s limbs from his body, before she snaps in two. She walks until she reaches the treeline at the edge of camp and sits down in the cool grass and doesn’t move, tries to keep herself still. 

Such a pitiful confrontation, with a man tied up, and she’s wondering if she’s about to be sick, her hands shaking and her heartbeat thrumming in her ears. The monster is curling in on itself, licking its wounds, as pathetic as Kieren begging for food, and Sadie’s body parts feel mismatched.

“Mrs. Adler?”

She jumps, feels stupid, and turns to see Arthur, stooped over a little to accommodate the tree branches, or perhaps in an attempt to reduce his height over her. His face is creased thoughtfully, and he drops his gaze a bit the moment she looks at him, as if embarrassed to be caught.

“Just wanted to make sure you were alright,” he mumbles, with a hint of irony in his voice, as if he suspects that this is, once again, a stupid question.

“Pretty fuckin’ far from it,” she sighs, and appreciates the smile that splits his face in response. There’s something giddy in answering so straightforwardly, and she feels conspiratorial, suddenly, like they’ve just shared a secret. He seems to catch the feeling too, and looks down again.

“Y’want company?”

“I don’t think so,” she says, but not unkindly. To be company for him she’d have to put up with her own company, and she doesn’t think she can just now.

“Alright then,” he replies softly, and for a moment she thinks he’s going to step forward, to touch her, and the monster squirms, cagey and snapping its fangs, but then he turns and leaves instead, walking back to camp to see who else needs him.

  
  


  1. _Lemoyne, Part One_



_“Lady, you are enjoyin’ this far too much!”_

On the way back from Rhodes, Sadie shoots a man in the head. She didn’t plan to do it, but likewise, she didn’t question it when the moment came. She’d only just got through telling Arthur the truth about herself, even if he didn’t know it. _Nobody’s taking nothing from me ever again_ , she told him, which was truer than he knew. This was how she confessed that there was a monster inside her, that she dreamed of tearing men’s ears off their heads with her teeth, of slitting men’s throats ear-to-ear. He thought she was just saying it, the way people say things every day, the way Pearson said things in his damn foolish letter, but she’d been trusting him with the truth.

So when the slimy, grimy-talking Lemoyne Raider boys fell in beside their wagon and tried to intimidate her, she didn’t wait to see what Arthur would do. She’d been telling the truth when she said she and Jake shared the work, and as often as not, he’d followed her lead. Jake’s daddy was a preacher; Sadie had come up even rougher than him. She knew how to knuckle down and push past exhaustion and hunger better than anyone she knew. She’d never killed a man before, but she’d killed plenty animals, and it was something of a shock to realize it was just as easy.

The shock propels her, though, and with Arthur cussing all the way she leads the charge and they pick off the bandits with relative ease. Arthur is murder with a shotgun – the deadest shot she’s ever met, though everyone says John was even better before his eye got mauled – and she doesn’t need to be, doesn’t need to think at all when the monster slides its limbs inside her own. Her blood is up, like a hunting dog’s, and the chase is a thrill. She’s hollering taunts and swearing a blue streak, her smile so wide her face burns. She doesn’t see or feel, just dodges and aims and squeezes the trigger, just lets the fire burn its way through her until she can’t hear anymore bullets whizzing, until there isn’t anyone else there alive but Arthur and the anxious, loyal horses, shifting their weight.

“I think we’re good here, Arthur!” she calls, the same odd grin still splitting her face. She can’t stop it; she doesn’t want to. She clambers into the wagon and waits for him, trembling finely as the strange painful grin finally melts from her face.

“So,” he says, when he pulls himself up beside her, as calm as if he’d simply collected the mail. No adrenaline is thrumming through him, no unbearable anxious excitement animates him. This is his normal, more normal than anything, more normal than the post office could ever be. Like he’d been born as crazy as she’d been made, which means it wasn’t crazy at all, just Arthur. “Pass those reigns here.”

She likes Arthur, probably the best of anyone in the gang, in part because he doesn’t talk much. There’s something dependable about him, solid, the way he seems instead to always be listening. She trusts him the most, if she had to trust one of them, and since Sean’s return party back in Horseshoe Overlook, she’d found herself holding his gaze when he greeted her, ever politely, as _Mrs. Adler_. He stood up for her with Pearson, in his way, and she’s found it’s easy to fall into a rhythm with him, that they share the same language of grief, of almost-saying, of being frank and ugly about a thing without ever quite daring to say what it was. So he understands that she can speak of Jake, of her harmonica, of her house and everything she owned being destroyed, but not in the same sentence. Not all at once. She doesn’t know what happened to him that he learned this same language, and she doesn’t ask. He only knows hers, after all, by accident.

She likes Arthur, but she isn’t giving him the reigns now. Not _now_.

“Why?” she spits, ready to remind him that she isn’t a wife anymore or a lady anymore, maybe isn’t really a woman anymore.

“Because you’ve caused enough trouble already,” he says, and his voice is fond.

“I’m fine,” she snaps, and then Athur’s big hands are on top of hers and she realizes hers are shaking, not with the fine, delicate quivers of the rest of her body, but hard, spastic and cramped. She swallows. Her body is coming back to itself; the monster is receding, going back to sleep. She’s left with the physical, the ashes. Her hands are shaking. Her heart is oversized, enormous, shuddering her chest as it pumps too fast.

She twists her hands in his, and he releases her at once, but she follows, grabs his rough hands in hers. The reigns stay between their palms, flattened, as she grips his hands with her trembling fingers.

He makes a little noise, a little _ah_ , and sets his thumbs against the backs of her hands, runs them once or twice over her veins and knuckles. She squeezes his hands very hard, and feels as if something liquid and hot and powerful is coming from the center of her and she needs to let it out, wants to let it out, wants a body pressed against her body as tightly as Arthur’s hands are pressed against her hands, wants to devour something savagely, to be crushed and held and filled, and she’s squeezing Arthur’s hands hard enough to leave crescent marks in the skin from her nails, and she can’t look up. He squeezes back.

They sit there, oddly posed, crushing one another’s hands and Sadie breathing hard and staring down at their intertwined fingers, thinking what might satisfy the monster inside of her, to climb on top of Arthur, to take a bite from his skin, to throw herself off the carriage and dash her head on a rock, and she’s considering how good any of those things would feel when Arthur says her name very quietly.

“Sadie,” he says again, and then their hands disconnect, lightly discolored from the tightness of their grip, and the furious desire drains out of Sadie all at once, like a dream she’d woken up from.

She passes him the reigns. He realigns his body so he’s facing straight ahead, and pulls gently, rousing the horses from their dreamy indifference.

  
  


  1. _Lemoyne, Part Two_



“Few more like her, there wouldn’t be much of a world left.”

He’d said it after the door closed, to Dutch, but Sadie heard it, and she thinks it means he knows what she is. She doesn’t want anyone to look at her, doesn’t want anyone to see the monster or the body she hides it in, but she can’t be mad at Arthur, who makes her laugh. There’s something liberating in knowing he sees what she is.

After Kieran dies something changes in the camp, sours or spoils, and it seems like every one of them is as hateful as she is, as resigned to bloodshed. Kieran, in the end, died the way anyone who tangled with O’Driscolls does, bloody and wronged. She’s resigned to it, and maybe Dutch is too, but she can tell the mood is festering around Shady Belle like an old wound.

She finds herself among the women, who are more openly consumed with worry and grief. Karen and Mary-Beth are warped with mourning, Karen for Sean and the compounded shock of Kieran, Mary-Beth for the poor kid himself and for the gentle little redemptive fantasy she’d cast them in. Molly is disconsolate, abandoned and unwilling to entertain any conversation that doesn’t dwell on misery. Mrs. Grimshaw remains remote and inscrutable, unaffected and dismissive, and Sadie never had much interest in winning Grimshaw’s approval as it were. Of the group, Abigail and Tilly keep their head best, though both are distracted and anxious. Abigail can’t think of anything but how close by her boy was when the O’Driscolls arrived, how unrelenting they’d been in their approach, how thoughtlessly they’d have shot the child as well. Tilly tries to reassure them all, but much of her time is devoted to sitting with Mary-Beth, absorbing her sorrow.

Sadie finds herself in a strange reversal of her first weeks with the gang, helplessly repeating the gestures of comfort. She can’t make it real, though, can’t stop feeling like an actress in a play – she’d meant what she said to Arthur about being finished with polite society. Even the politeness of women being kind to one another felt foreign and ill-fitting, even though she cares for all of them enough, is especially grateful to the young women, to Karen, Abigail, Tilly, and Mary-Beth, for their patience with her when she arrived. So she tries. She pantomimes. She hopes it’s enough. She hopes that, at least, they can recognize what she’s trying to do, as she recognized the same, hazily, in the freezing Colter spring.

It’s been ten-odd days since Dutch busted his head in Saint Denis, and between the women, Hosea, and Arthur, the atmosphere of constant, muted fretting is becoming suffocating. Sadie is restless, antsy, knowing they’re pinned down for O’Driscolls or the law but can’t move forward until Dutch relents a bit, admits that the leap from Bayou Nwa to Tahiti is an impossibly large one. She doesn’t know if these fixations are a regular occurrence in the life cycle of the Van Der Linde gang – and Dutch’s proselytizing certainly echoes constant, fervent vows of revenge on Colm O’Driscoll back when Sadie first met him – but everyone is tense. Sadie overhears Bill and Karen squabbling, Hosea snapping at Javier, Dutch berating John. Tilly tells her to let it blow over.

Arthur, for his part, does whatever Dutch tells him to with the determination of a soldier and about as much input. When he is around the mansion, he keeps to himself, bent over that precious journal and talking lowly with John, Hosea, occasionally Charles. She’s twice caught him walking back from the little grave Charles dug for Kieran, face stormy. Sadie, keeping sharp for the faintest sound of descending O’Driscolls, doesn’t know if she’s the only one who’s noticed.

The third time she sees him, it’s well past nightfall, coming on midnight, and she’s out on the porch smoking, relishing being alone, waiting for the sound of horses in case the O’Driscolls come back. He doesn’t know she’s there, she guesses, as he tramps back from Kieran’s grave with his head down, sloshing through the mud in the dark.

“Hey, Arthur,” she calls lightly. She doesn’t want to startle him. If she believed in ghosts, she’d suspect the bayou was full of them.

He does start a little, but quickly reorients, seems to find her face in the dark. “Mrs. Adler,” he replies, and hurries up on the porch. She gestures for him to sit down.

He hesitates, then nods a bit and sits next to her, in the same wobbly chairs they’d been sitting in just before Kieran’s headless body came in on horseback.

They sit together for a moment, watching the idly stirring grass, not speaking. Arthur turns his leather journal over in his hands. She’d teased him about it before, saying she’d sneak a peek at it one of these days, but she doesn’t think she would if she could, now. She doesn’t know what changed.

“What happened to that kid,” she says, finally, “weren’t your fault.”

She feels him stiffen next to her; she doesn’t need to look. He doesn’t believe her, she knows. Good men, she’s known for a long time, are predictable. Good men who think they’re bad ones, she’s learned, even more so.

After a long time, Arthur finally leans back in his seat and sighs. “Boy saved my life,” he grunts, “and I could not save his. I don’t like that.”

Sadie hums knowingly. The surprisingly simple science of outlaw morality is never clearer than when she speaks to Arthur about it. Lemoyne Raiders and barkeeps and travelers are one thing – though the gang usually steers largely clear of civilians, in her experience, so long as the rich ain’t considered civil – and the gang is paramount. So even though Kieran was never quite family, a life is still worth a life, and Arthur wears guilt like a coat. He fills his pockets with it, never has enough. 

“Nobody would,” she concedes, “but that don’t make it your fault.”

Arthur sniffs and hums a vague assent. After another moment’s silence, he says, “Well, you were a wonder as always. Fought twice as bravely as the rest of us.”

She turns to look at him then, but he’s looking out on the fields. She doesn’t know how her bravery compares to anyone else’s – she can keep her head in a fight these days, but the name _O’Driscoll_ still lets the monster loose in her body. The knowledge that any of the men she shot might be the one who killed Jake, might be the one who laughed when she begged them, might be the last of the filthy bastards left – it was an engine in her. She wanted, in those moments, to stretch the limits of the possible, to kill a thousand men, to smell blood so thick she choked. Can that be bravery?

“Don’t know about that,” she tells Arthur.

He turns to meet her gaze. “It’s good,” he says, slowly, like he’s choosing his words carefully. “You fight like that – you’re fightin’ _for_ something, instead of just to fight.”

Sadie snorts. “I’d have said the opposite.”

Arthur shakes his head. “I been fighting all my life, Mrs. Adler. I don’t need a reason, so no fight’s worth more’n another. Hell, I ain’t even fighting half the time, pullin’ a gun is just how I say hello.” He smiles wryly, shakes his head again. “You – ”

“It ain’t _for_ nothing,” Sadie spits, cutting him off, suddenly angry. “It’s just – I can kill every last O’Driscoll and I _will_ , God’s my witness, but none of that will change nothin’. I’ll still be – ”

She stands up, suddenly, without deciding to, knocking her chair loudly to the floor, the anger drained from her but an urgent, pressing sadness squeezing her away, forcing her out of her chair and to the door. She knows she can bathe in blood and she still won’t have her husband back, she won’t ever get to go back to not knowing what it feels like to lose him.

Arthur has stood too, and she meets his eye, unsure what to say. She doesn’t think they’re different in a good way. They’re not the same, but she won’t have him pinning virtues to her. That’s Mary-Beth’s job, and look where it got her.

“I didn’t mean any offense,” he mumbles, and she nods, she knows, she knows he didn’t. There’s nothing to say. They’re standing almost uncomfortable close in the dark. She can feel the monster’s scales shifting under her skin, too close. Her body thrums with something, not that burning, insatiable desire from Rhodes but something else, a cavernous, echoing longing. A yearning made worse by knowing how close she’d come to fulfilling it.

“You take on too much,” she says, and she chuckles a little even as her voice is rough with sudden, stupid tears, and she turns and heads back into the house without another word, unable to trust that her body will stay in one piece.

  
  


  1. _Coda: Lakay_



She knows perfectly well that the letter she hides at Shady Belle is a foolish prayer. The house is creaking and groaning and resoundingly empty, and she knows she’s a fool. There are more pressing matters to attend to. Hosea and Lenny are buried, now, and Sadie chides herself for lingering with the dead. The living need her more. She and Charles have spirited the survivors away, and now there’s nothing to do but start again. They can’t keep waiting for the dead men to come back, she keeps telling them all. Tilly told her to stop it, that a little gentleness never hurt anyone, but she has no patience for it. John, she will concede, might yet be rescued, assuming he hasn’t hanged yet, but there’s no way to get him just now, and they can’t sit and wait for a magical return. The rest – Dutch, Javier, Micah, Bill, Arthur – are surely dead, and waiting for them is even more pitiful. There’s a world turning around them, she keeps saying back at Lakay, and there’s no sense in waiting on ghosts.

Two nights ago, she dreamed a familiar dream: standing in the farmhouse, before it burnt, calling for Jake. But halfway through, she’d called for Arthur, until her throat was hoarse.

Just like Jake, he never answered back. 

So she’s a hypocrite. But she’s not a cynic, really – she just lives by what she can hold in her own hands, see with her own eyes. She can overprepare, if that’s what she wants to call being a stupidly hopeful child, a praying little girl convincing herself that her letter to five dead men will be read by anyone but the next scavengers to hold up the place.

But she’s here, she’s written her letter, no sense not dropping it off. _Dear Uncle Tacitus_. If that’s an admission that it’s Arthur she’s placing her faith in, then it’s just as well nobody will ever read it.

She’s an animal, a feral beast, and she doesn’t mourn anymore. She suspects she’d never have written the letter at all for Dutch, or Javier, or Bill; certainly never for Micah. She’s already living in a world where Arthur is dead, she tells herself firmly, but if she leaves the letter she can pretend a little while longer that he isn’t.

He’s never let down yet.

  1. _New Hanover, Part 2_



Abigail’s face is buried between Sadie’s shoulder blades, and they’re the same now, leveled by the same rotten word. Widows, the pair of them. But Jack’s alive, with Tilly, so Sadie goes as fast as she can. Abigail rides side saddle, and she smells like blood. Sadie knows if anyone tries to stop them, she’ll skin them alive.

She isn’t stupid. She knows they’re out of miraculous escapes. Arthur’s been half-dead for some time now, even he knows it, and she promised herself she’d never bank on childish fantasy again, never dream or hope of miracles, never care again who lived or died beyond avenging Jake. If Jake could see her now –

But he can’t, and Arthur can, or could, did, and she knows she’ll never see him again. She hopes he correctly read her silence, because she can’t say what’s been true for some time now. She thinks Arthur probably understands that.

A few days after they’d bathed Hanging Dog Ranch in blood, Arthur had asked her, casually, why she’d wanted him to come along. It had seemed like an almost silly question – who else could she bring? – and she’d thought she’d answered it. She trusted him.

Once, when she and Jake were newlywed, her wedding band had slipped from her finger in the middle of a late-autumn day while she pulled weeds. She hadn’t noticed until nightfall, and though she and Jake had scoured the dirt by moonlight, they couldn’t find it. She’d apologized, and he’d laughed and said the wedding band was only metal. _You still my girl?_ he’d asked. _Yeah, I’m still your girl,_ she’d replied, and he’d pulled her closer and said then the ring didn’t matter, who could care about a ring when there was a woman you loved right there beside you.

They forgot about it. The winter wore on, that first winter they were married, long and bitter and relentless, and it was April before the ground began to emerge, brown and watery, from beneath the snow. On the first day of May, Sadie had stepped out into the garden to find her wedding ring sitting in some wet, yellow grass, clean and waiting like it had been placed there a moment ago. She’d laughed aloud, and run to the barn to tell Jake, and he’d laughed too, and she loved the plain gold band many times more for having returned to her, when she thought it was gone for good.

Why did she bring Arthur with her?

“Because I trust you,” she’d told him. He was there when the monster was born, but still talked to her like a lady.

Abigail takes a shuddering breath behind her, and Sadie is back in the present, where Arthur’s lungs are chewed up and deflated, where he runs a fever most nights, where Sadie has been doing chores for him for over a month now without telling anyone, because he can’t do what he once could. She suspects the illness and its grim, relentless progression is a convenient enough reason to do what Arthur was going to do anyways. What he’s been hurtling towards since Eagle Flies had died practically in his lap. The day she asked him to come to Hanging Dog was the day he asked her to get the Marstons out. He’d been living like a dead man for a long time. She wishes –

She wishes she could talk to him about him, the way she could talk to him about Jake, about Karen and Mary-Beth, about Micah’s nasty insinuations and Pearson’s grumbling, about the people she knew and things she cared about before, about her harmonica. She wishes she could tell him that she wants him, in some shapeless constant way, if not the way she wanted Jake then some other way, she wants him _there_ , she wants to be ugly and ungracious in an ugly and ungracious world with him beside her, somehow neither. She wishes she could tell him that he’s the only person she can talk to and feel like her head is above water.

But that’s a chance, like many others, she’s missed, and now she can delude herself that he’ll come back from a standoff with Dutch, who has come unspooled, while he’s barely walking. He certainly didn’t entertain that fantasy.

Hours after Hanging Dog, after she’d walked into a creek and held her own head under, after she’d sat on a rock until her clothes and skin and hair had dried, she’d found him in town, sitting on the steps of the clapboard revival church that welcomed all God’s children but never the Van der Linde gang. He had his journal on his lap, a pencil in his hand, but he’d looked up when she got closer. He moved over on the step without a word.

On the steps of the church, he told her he was sorry. He offered her a portion of his grief, in broad outline – _I ain’t ever lost everything like you did, but_ – and she learned he’d been a father once, learned he woke up one morning as a child in his mother’s arms to find she’d died in the night, that he was held by a corpse. As she’d suspected, his north star was Dutch, and with that ground shaken underneath his feet some things came loose. _I don’t know what I’m livin’ for anymore_ , he’d sighed, and she’d said, _Brother, you can join the club_.

There was a closeness between them that day that went beyond what she’d ever felt for Jake, or anyone else. That kind of mutual understanding, she suspects, can’t exist unless it’s shared by ghosts. _You and me, we’re more ghosts than people_ , he’d said, and, _Apart from my Jake, you’re the best man I’ve known_ , she’d said, which was a little bit like love.

She gets Abigail to Tilly and Jack without incident, and both are unharmed. Tilly’s still shaken – Dutch was her north star, too, as he was Abigail’s, and poor John’s – but she’s safe, and Jack doesn’t know how close he came to being an orphan.

“Come with us, Sadie,” Tilly says, her arm around Abigail’s shoulder, and if Sadie were still a woman and not a monster in a widow’s skin, she’d be able to tell Tilly thank you, to tell Tilly she was exceptionally kind.

“Last thing you need’s one more outlaw,” she says instead, nodding to Abigail and then to Jack, who watches her with his soft eyes. She hopes he forgets every moment of this, and that Abigail is able to take him somewhere nice, civilized even. The two of them deserve that; Arthur was right. “I’ll make my way. You alright now?”

Tilly, who seems to have been expecting this answer, says, “I reckon we are. Be safe now, Sadie. So long.”

“You as well,” she says. “Abigail, Jack.” She nods to each of them, and Abigail’s face is red and streaked with tears. There’s a fleck of Agent Milton’s blood in her eyebrow. To become a widow and a murderer in one day – Sadie is jealous and sorry both. Jack waves, nonplussed.

“Stay,” Abigail sobs, as Sadie gathers up Bob’s reigns. She’s got to know it’s useless to ask, but Sadie doesn’t begrudge her for not having the wherewithal for another goodbye today.

“Go. Don’t look back,” she says, her own version of farewell, and then she goes, charging aimlessly west, away from the scene of the crimes.

It’s nightfall before she stops, slides off Bob to breathe and light a cigarette, under a flimsy wooden sign that says “Cholla Springs.” She wonders if Arthur has died yet, and feels a heavy certainty. She isn’t being mystical. They both knew the odds.

The monster has filled her body, and overtaken it. She must have missed the moment it took full control, stopped bothering to hide, but now it’s passed. Its fangs have broken through her gums, its scales have emerged from miniscule slits in her skin, its claws have burrowed out of her fingers. It’s invisible, but she knows. She doesn’t mind. She always finishes what she starts. 

The monster and her are the same animal, now. They breathe the still, desert-cold night air as one. They have one more good man left to avenge. 

**Author's Note:**

> the title is from the Aeneid, because I gotta use my degree somewhere ("An immense, misshapen, marvelous monster whose eye is out.")
> 
> my Tumblr is @wolfmeat where I can be found hyperfixating on cowboys


End file.
